Day: June 3, 2016

In case you missed the premiere last night of Quincy Jones: Burning the Light on HBO, it’s available to subscribers now On Demand as well as HBO GO and HBO NOW. I wrote a review for my friends at Decider. Here’s an excerpt: By the time he hit the stage this spring in Los Angeles, he not only was ready to face the cameras, but also his own mortality and the whirlwind of attention he has received in 2016. “Now I feel pressure, and expectations are high, and I feel expectations to die,” Jones jokes early in the hour....

My review of Bo Burnham’s new Netflix special, Make Happy, is on Decider.com. What’s it about? I’ll let Burnham tell you what he says 45 minutes into his latest hour of comedy and art: “But for real. What is it about? It’s about performing. I try to make my show about other things but it always ends up becoming about performing. I started performing very young, as a teenager, professionally. And as a comedian, what you’re supposed to do, you’re supposed to talk about what you know. And what I knew always was performing. So to talk about traffic...

Two years ago this weekend, after a Friday night gig in Delaware, Tracy Morgan and his entourage were on their way home when a Walmart tractor trailer slammed into their SUV on the New Jersey Turnpike, killing comedian “Jimmy Mack” and almost killing Morgan and his opening act, Ardie Fuqua. Morgan and Fuqua remained in comas for weeks, before emerging and undergoing more than a year of grueling, private physical rehabilitation. That they’re alive is a miracle in itself. That now, two years later, they’re both back on comedy stages performing in clubs and theaters — truly a blessed...

You’re forgiven for believing that Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is the first movie from The Lonely Island. Nobody really saw Hot Rod in the theater (it earned $14 million after spending $25 million). And that 2007 comedy — which starred Andy Samberg as an amateur daredevil, was written by Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer, and was directed by Schaffer — only became a Lonely Island movie after original screenwriter Pam Brady couldn’t get it made for years with her intended star, Will Ferrell. Schaffer since directed The Watch, which we didn’t. Taccone received a Razzie nominaton for acting in...

FOX has ordered a pilot presentation for That’s My Bus, the animated series about a New York City bus driver from comedians Dan Perlman and Will Julian that won the New York Television Festival’s pitch contest last year at Montreal’s Just For Laughs. It’s too late to submit for the JFL Comedy Search contest this year. But there still is time to enter the NYTVF’s central feature — its Independent Pilot Competition. That’s where the cash and prizes are, in the form of development deals from Comedy Central, IFC, truTV, Seeso, and Bento Box. The regular submission deadline for...